Student robot achieves winning goals

Tom Shelley reports on a development in autonomous robotics that shows interesting potential for manufacturing A surprisingly simple but intelligent robot developed by French students can locate objects, gather them, and throw them into a receptacle. It was developed to win at 'Coconut Rugby', the task set for this year's Eurobot 2004 European World Contest for autonomous robots, held this year in La Ferte Bernard in France. The aim of the competition is to hone robotic skills among students at universities, engineering schools with an eye on potential developments in manufacturing and in undertaking repetitive tasks. The game had small rugby balls lodged in trees and on the ground. The aim of the game was to collect the balls and either bring them to the opponent's goal (a try) or to throw them into a basket behind and between two coconut trees (drop goal). According to Emmanuel Auclair, the leader of the Supaero team from Toulouse, which won the competition, their robot used a laser to locate the balls in the trees so it could then approach them and knock them down. The robot then picked up the balls between two belts. It could store up to three collected balls before manoeuvring itself into position from which it could throw them using a similar double belt mechanism, not totally dissimilar to the double belt mechanisms used to handle tickets at automatic gates on railway stations. M. Auclair told Eureka that he entered all possible tree locations into the robot's memory, and then used a program written in 'Very basic 'C' to deal with issues of strategy and planning. Although the behaviour of the robot looked intelligent when demonstrated, M. Auclair insisted that its working could not be described as artificially intelligent, because he understood every move the that robot made and the reason for this. The robot is said to have been made up from about 150 components and took about 800 man hours to build. The project was sponsored by Dassault Systemes. Tasks that require picking things up, collecting them and putting them somewhere in the real world range from collecting fallen fruit or ground grown agricultural products through tidying up children's play areas to safely collecting live munitions. The Eurobot competition started in 1998 in France, and although the 2004 event had 41 entrants from 21 countries, it was a French entry that won as in every previous competition. The last time a British team took part was the University of Hull's entry in 1998, which came 7th out of 9. The 2005 competition will take place in Yverdon-les-bains in Switzerland from May 19th to May 22nd. The game for 2005 is to involve using balls to knock down skittles, some of which will be on stands, complicated by the presence of bridges and ditches. The Eurobot series is one of around 90 national and international autonomous robot competitions that now take place each year in different countries. Some seemed to be aimed at useful, peaceful goals, such as the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest, while others have a strongly military flavour. Eurobot - European World Contest for Autonomous Robots World Robot Contests and Competitions Email Emmanuel Auclair Pointers * Robot could locate objects, some of which were lodged above ground level, and others of which were on the ground, collect them and throw them into a receptacle * Coming out of a student competition, one of a large number now taking place around the world, it is an example of the increasing sophistication of autonomous robotic devices with considerable possible real world applications, both civilian and military